03. Gods at the Well of Souls (16 page)

"Maybe, maybe not," Gus responded. "It's handy, yeah, but it's not as much as it  seems to other people. If they have the equivalent of a television scanner, I'd  show up on it, and I'll trip any alarms. This place has got to be guarded like  Fort Knox. It's not like I can just walk in there and do what I want." "Agreed. But I'm sure he has something in mind and knows all that. Well, we'll  see this evening, won't we?" 

They pulled into the northern terminus station at Subar about an hour after  dark. The welcoming committee wasn't that hard to spot. Two Dillians and an  Erdomese female stood out from the Agonite crowd as much as or more than they  did. 

"Oh, my! There's only that gruesome blob and that poor girl!" Anne Marie  exclaimed. "I thought there was another!" 

Julian looked at the Leeming oozing off the train and frowned. "I see that  Colonel Lunderman hasn't changed a bit. It's just that you can see him so much  more clearly now," she commented dryly. 

"Greetings, my fellow expatriates, greetings!" the colonel said with his usual  oily tones. Gus had wondered if Lunderman could say "Good morning" without  sounding insincere. "I am Colonel Lunderman, and we might as well get the usual  shock over with right off the bat. Say hello, Gus." 

All three of the others were somewhat startled when the Dahir did just that. To  have a huge dragonlike multicolored creature suddenly appear where one hadn't  really noticed it before was always startling. 

"Strictly defense," Gus assured them. "We're too big and bright to hide, so we  have this ability. You'll get used to it. I can't turn it off." Julian recovered first. "Whew! That's some trick! Could have saved us a lot of  trouble if we'd had something like that!" She looked over at the colonel.  "You've come a long way since we last met, Lunderman." 

"And changed a good deal. I would not have known you at all. Captain Beard."  While forewarned, the colonel in fact was amazed at the transformation in the  person he'd known. In voice, tone, movements, manner-in virtually every category  there wasn't a trace of the Julian Beard he remembered in the Erdomese female he  addressed. 

"Julian, Colonel. Just Julian," she responded, grim-faced. "Captain Beard is  dead, or as good as dead. Think of me entirely as you see me. I have buried him  forever." Too bad the same didn't happen to you, she added to herself. If she'd  despised the human colonel, she positively loathed what she was seeing now. Gus,  too, made her feel very uncomfortable. He was creepy. She turned to the third,  silent member of the party and softened immediately. "And this must be Terry." Terry smiled at her, capturing the sudden warmth inside the Erdomese. She was  very pretty and seemed smart and strong, too. Terry couldn't figure out why Gus  wouldn't produce the same friendly feeling, but it wasn't anything she could do  much about right now. 

The four-legged blond twins were also beautiful but not easy to catch thoughts  from. Their thinking seemed to go back and forth between one and the other so  that it was almost as if they were the same person in two bodies. Trying to  follow it made her head hurt, and she turned back to Julian. 

"Come," Julian told them all, even though her attention seemed to be drawn more  and more to Terry. "This is not the place to speak of things. You never know who  or what's around. Let's get to the people running the show, and then we can all  fill each other in on everything." 

Gus looked around the station with the experienced eye of a professional  cameraman. It wasn't very crowded, and all the Agonese looked the same anyway  except for size and dress, but he could spot the shadows and the tails. They had  a way of not looking at a person and not being even curious about that person  that made them stand out to a professional's eye in the same way they did in a  crowd back on Earth. He wondered which were from the cops and which were from  the bad guys, but there was no way to tell that. The breed was made in the same  factory. 

Inspector Kurdon proved to be another of the same type, but very dry and very  professional. He greeted them almost perfunctorily, and Terry couldn't help but  feel that he, too, had more of an interest in her than in the others for some  reason, although there was no sense from him of the friendly, warm interest  radiated by Julian. 

"I know you all want to compare notes, so I won't keep you long," he told them.  "My people will be able to provide appropriate if not very exciting meals for  all of you. I'm not going to tell you to get an early rest because the later you  go to sleep and the later you wake up tomorrow, the better. We are going in  tomorrow night, but not until nearly midnight. Surprise will be very important  to this operation." 

"Surprise? With all these people and all this security you think you really  fooled 'em, Inspector?" Gus asked him. 

Kurdon looked at Gus with a bit more respect. "You are absolutely right in that  sense. We can hardly hide the fact that something is up here, but our  intelligence assures me that they still can't figure out what it is. My  advantage is that they really believe the headquarters to be both politically  and physically secure. Even if they think that we're moving against them, it  doesn't mean as much as you might believe. First of all, we are not after drugs  or even criminals of any sort. We're after their computer records, which are not  easily transportable." 

"Won't they just erase them the moment your people break in?" the colonel asked. "Maybe, but they have no equivalent to this headquarters anywhere else. I'm sure  they have backups, but they aren't linked because such a link can't be run  through other hexes and they can't be stored here and be totally secure from us.  Putting this headquarters out of operation will severely cripple their entire  operation worldwide. It might be months, more likely years, before they get  things running with any degree of efficiency again, and not without great cost  in the interim. A lot of other hexes, not to mention the Patrol, have been  wanting to move on this, but they couldn't so long as Agon and Liliblod allowed  this center to continue. If it's destroyed, they will move, and the politicians  in their pockets will scramble to be on our side all of a sudden. For that  reason, I believe they will try not to erase the active records but rather  depend on their own security to keep us from getting to the information. Then,  when it blows over, they could have their own people mixed in with our crews and  download and recover what they need. That is not going to happen. I believe we  can crack their codes, but whether we can or not, the computers there and all  their data will be either in our hands or completely destroyed." "You sound pretty confident you can get it," Julian noted with skepticism  dripping from her tongue. "What if you can't?" 

"The drug business is the inspector's problem," the colonel told her. "Our  interest is quite different. Some suitable prisoners, people who work there  routinely day in and day out, should be what we need, although getting access to  the records would make it simpler and surer. If our quarry is in there, we will  have her. If not, we need to know where she might have been taken." "If they don't just kill her when you break in," Gus put in. 

"If they can kill her, she's not who we are interested in," the colonel  responded coolly. "However, I have already seen enough evidence on my own to  suspect that this is not a problem." 

"Yes, but Lori isn't some superman!" Tony pointed out. "We could be killing  him!” 

Kurdon looked up impatiently at the Dillian. "We have been through this already.  Everything we know suggests that if we cannot free him, he's probably better off  dead. He is certainly addicted to a particular mutation of this drug in any  event, which will cause enough of a problem. I am open to any suggestions on  making it safe, but so far I've heard none. Until I do, this matter is closed.  Now, if you will excuse me, I still have a lot of preparation to do. If there  are no further questions, you should go and get acquainted and eat and finally  sleep." 

"Just one question," Gus said. "How you gonna get in there?" 

The impassive turtlelike head looked straight at him. "Come tomorrow night and  you'll see." 

As Kurdon expected, the rest of the evening was much more relaxed, with a great  deal of talking and comparing stories and experiences. For the first time Gus  heard the account of the kidnapping of Lori and Mavra Chang and got a picture of  the latter totally at odds with any memories he had of her back in the jungles.  In fact, the Mavra Chang who emerged from the descriptions and tales of the  twins and from Julian sounded to Gus an awful lot like a female version of  Nathan Brazil. This at first glance seemed to make even more mysterious their  estrangement from one another, but, Gus thought, often the pairs that seemed to  work best together were ones one would never put together on one's own. A ship  with two equally strong-willed captains was a ship that sailed forever in  circles. 

The colonel was something of the odd man out in the circle. There was something  about him that made everybody who met him feel slightly uncomfortable, and aside  from some reminiscences with Tony of their shared homeland in their original  native Portuguese, the colonel did not participate all that much. He excused  himself early, but the rest of them went on talking well into the night. Terry liked almost everybody except the colonel. Somehow this group of very  strange-looking creatures seemed very comfortable, very natural. It was  something in the way they thought and interacted; no matter how alien they now  were physically from one another, they were more alike in the way they thought  than any of the other creatures she'd met, including the doctor. It was a  familiar, relaxed feeling that was hard to describe, but it was comfortable to  her. Somehow, in a way she didn't quite get, she knew that all these people were  her people, the same way she'd felt about Gus from the start. She didn't really  try to follow much of their conversation; it was kind of dull, and a lot of it  made no sense to her. They seemed to be able to talk and talk and talk on the  same topic over and over without getting bored, but it didn't matter. The  underlying din felt like a warm, safe blanket, a haven from the unknown and  truly alien world out there. 

Finally, when it was quite late, they couldn't keep it up any longer. Gus told  them that he would find a place suitable for himself and not to worry; Terry was  physically best suited for Julian's tent, which had that floor of soft pillows.  Gus couldn't make Julian out at first. She'd been a guy, Mister Military  Recruiting Poster, then was turned into a woman in a society that did not value  females, had been rescued from it by Lori, and now, with Lori gone, seemed like  a strong but dedicated man hater. It was almost as if she'd literally hated,  disowned, and, as she'd told the colonel at the station, killed off every trace  of who and what she'd been back on Earth. After hearing the colonel's  description of the old Captain Beard on the train coming north, he hadn't  expected this at all. In a very different way, Julian had reinvented herself as  thoroughly as Terry had. 

Terry, stay with Julian. I'll be nearby, he thought in the girl's direction. She  doesn't like men much, so if you see me inside and she can't, just pretend I'm  not there. Okay? Terry seemed a bit confused but nodded. The inside of Julian's  tent was a veritable Art Deco wonderland of colors and exotic perfume scents,  and it even had a full-length mirror tall enough for the Erdomite to see her  whole self in. Terry found the whole thing a little dizzying and the scents a  bit overpowering, but she got used to them after a while. It was the mirror that  fascinated her the most, though. 

She'd seen her reflection before, but never her whole body at once, and it  fascinated her. She was still not used to that face staring back at her. The  thing was, she had no comparison with what she was supposed to look like except  Gus's mental images of the old Terry, and while she could see her in the  reflection, it wasn't anywhere near the same. Chubby, bigger thighs, bigger ass,  bigger breasts, and there, the tummy that kind of stuck out and didn't look like  the rest. That's where the baby is growing, she thought, more in wonder than  anything else. She felt it, much like a hard lump inside her, and every once in  a while, when lying around or sitting, she felt it move. 

Julian watched her for a little while, then came over. "I was told you're going  to have a baby. You shouldn't be anywhere near here, let alone on this kind of  trip. These men don't care about you or it. I was one of them once, and I know  how they think. My husband was a woman once, but the Well World made her a man,  and before long he started acting and thinking just like the rest of them." She  sighed. "You're a fish out of water, just like me. You can't go home, and  neither can I, even to our homes here. When this is over, I'm going hunting for  a place for fish out of water. Maybe an island like the one you were stuck on,  uninhabited. Maybe a little multiracial place where we could live our lives and  just be ourselves without having to be what we're expected to be." She paused.  "You just stick with me. I'll see they don't let you come to any harm." Terry didn't think anybody meant her harm, but a place to just live and see the  baby grow without all this other stuff sounded pretty nice. 

Kurdon had his Agonite commanders there as well as the foreigners about three  hours after sundown. 

"All right, I've briefed the advance teams already, and some of this operation  is already under way," he told them. "We've taken out every shadow and spy we  can't control, so they're pretty well blind, and we're set up with the  explosives, drills, and weapons in the forest above the headquarters complex.  The raid is set for exactly midnight. At eleven fifty-eight the gang in the  market will be out cold from gas being introduced there now, and a team will  enter and cut all communications from the subbasement there to the headquarters.  That will set off alarms, but at exactly midnight, only two minutes later, the  charges and borers will start, and we will blow the main entrance, which is in  Liliblod. This may cause a diplomatic problem later, and absolutely no one, and  I mean that, is to cross the border. The charge should be enough to bring  sufficient materials down on the entrance that it will be blocked. If by any  chance it is not, we have sharpshooters just this side of the border to make  certain nobody gets out from that end. The only emergency exits they have are  into Agon, which will be easy to control since they're in line with the air  exchangers. I want every unit in place behind the borers. Get in there as fast  as possible. Stun or freeze anything that moves; kill anything you see that  doesn't immediately surrender. Clear?"